Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Of Zircons

For most of my life I’ve lived in small cities. It’s only been in occasional visits and short-lived visits that I’ve witnessed the metropolitan life. It had all the requirements for the making of crests-through-absence, which is how a part of this crest had begun to take the current form. Now I’m living in the capital and I’m probably enjoying it more than those have always lived here.

As a crest-through-absence, I also feel almost like having memories from the 80s. That couldn’t be so unlikely as towards the countryside cities in this country there’s still this feeling, which is very nostalgic, but also saddening at the same time. But I know this feeling also bears crests of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which I never visited, but I was always watching on tv. I have crests of leaving school and coming home, though my education has always been in public schools of these smaller cities.

Zircons mean to me all those feelings related to cities, like the graffiti walls, the modern and the industrial, and… pollution? But I have prefixes to refer to main subcategories. Now I can think of five special kinds.The Grey Zircons, the Drizzle Zircons, Dusk Zircons, the Golden Zircon and Midnight Zircon. The first one is about how cities feel like in cloudy days, specially in Sunday mornings when streets are melancholic. Those ballads by thrash metal and grunge bands are what I once called the Sunday Gray Songs. I don’t really know how I got this taste for this setting, but I love it anyway.

The Drizzle Zircons mean to me the powerful effect rain can have in the urban scenario. It all increases with the Golden Zircon, which is the effect those yellowish streetlights have. It’s incredibly attractive to me the lights reflecting on the wet sidewalks, or the traffic flowing. In the average night, the Golden Zircon can represent these city lights that are so stunning and hypnotizing to me. God only knows how much time I’ve spent watching all these urban constellations. The Dusk Zircon is that time in-between day and night, when the sun is gone but there’s still sunlight. When everybody is moving about, coming home or going to college or going to enjoy the night or meet their significant others. Jazz or blues music throughout the evolving of nightness enables some interesting mindscapes. The Midnight Zircon is the emptiness of the late night. It’s peaceful with these golden lights, but in some places it feels creepy. It’s around this time that the night smells like mist.

Around this time it starts getting more intimate with Garnets, which Zircon shares a strange relationship. Maybe it’s about the architecture, or because when we first moved closer to the state capital our house was near this cemetery. Nowadays when I go around that neighborhood the Garnets start showing and I have the feeling of eeriness. When I lived there I had some friends who were all about playstation games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Castlevania.

Peridots also make an interesting combination with Zircons. Cities are very green around here, and in my mind I feel the effect they have, those huge, deep-looking trees that darken the streets. Also there are these imperial trees that represent the Portuguese colonization that are also one of the ways the Zircons and Peridots can be combined. Now, when I think of it, the Portuguese baroque architecture also seems to help this link between Zircons and Garnets.

Last but not least, this can’t be a generalization of the urban feelings. The sense of place or Genius Loci can’t be ignored. I admire profoundly the feeling I can breathe from each city, be it a metropolis like New York, Tokyo or São Paulo, or a littoraneous city like Florianópolis, or those smaller and smaller cities and villages, the way the square, the church and the hotel are placed around the main (or only avenue). So, yeah, the elements that draw together to form its identity. I use each city’s name or its category as a prefix to represent this kind of Zircon subcrests. It’s puzzling, though, how I’ve got this subcrest I’m calling Soviet Zircon.